


a lantern, shining across the dimensions

by Yaoiloverread



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Introspection, Prompt Fill, Will POV, bad metaphors, possible ooc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 15:36:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/800328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yaoiloverread/pseuds/Yaoiloverread
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The most compassionate people you will ever meet, empathics, and the loneliest. I mean, exposing themselves to all those hidden feelings, all that guilt, pain, and sorrow." The Doctor, 'Hide'</p>
            </blockquote>





	a lantern, shining across the dimensions

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta-ed, so please forgive me. Also not dealing with all the plot twists of Doctor Who (just because).
> 
> Disclaimers: I don't own either 'Hannibal' or 'Doctor Who', or any of their characters.

**a lantern, shining across the dimensions**

 

"Sometimes at night I leave the lights on in my little house and walk across the flat fields. When I look back from a distance, the house is like a boat on the sea." _And I am the lighthouse, guiding it to safety_ , he did not mention. _That is why I cannot sleep_.

In the daylight, it was all too easy to speak, to describe the images that came to his mind, to illuminate what the killers were thinking, what they were feeling when they did what they did, when they killed. But at night, oh, night was when the creatures came, he couldn't hide from them, from the killers, from the inner monsters, and they became him, and they ate him up like prey, and he became one of them. This was usually when he awoke, gasping for breath, covered in sweat and ignoring the feeling of blood on his hands. And the bad thing, the absolutely worst thing of all, was that he couldn't blame them. They were, after all, attracted to the light.

Just like the Crooked Man from the stories, ugly on the outside, but he loved, and was loved, and love never ends, not love. They would call him a monster, but he felt, and Will felt with him, and thus he refused to play with the other boys near the Caliburn House, and stuck to running around home, chasing after and being chased by the Crooked Man and his Wife. They'd thought that it was an imaginary game, that the Crooked Man and his Wife didn't exist (because Will wasn't allowed to show them), they thought he was weird, he could somehow tell, and he didn't want to stay where he wasn't wanted.

His parents were worried, but knew that he was defending his friends, their dear friends, cousin Hila's friends too, although she liked to tell him stories of exploration, and getting lost, and being scared by first appearances when he only wanted to be helped, and how sometimes that can create friendships of a sort, because ghost stories are not always ghost stories, they're love stories too.

"Will!" Katz called to him one dreary October night, after they'd finished catching the latest killer, careful not to knock into any of the morbidly interested children gathered on the sidewalk, dressed as pirates and princesses (luckily there weren't any bodies for clean-up). "We're gonna head out to the bar afterwards, want to join us?" When he'd looked back, confused, she'd wheedled, "We're gonna tell ghost stories...?"

And she didn't understand why he laughed.

 

\--

 

The first thing anyone noticed about him, while growing up, was that he tended to take after his father, always ducking his head, don't make eye contact, you'll see them all the more clearly, and no one has to live with that type of guilt, let alone two of you. He'd found a medal in the attic once, an old Victoria Cross crammed in a cloth-lined box, wrapped in a dark box hidden in a chest of drawers. He'd touched it then, and the guilt and sorrow and anguish rushed over him, until he blacked out, and woke up again in his room, father worriedly sitting by his bedside holding his hand. He never found that medal again, so he must have dreamt it up, and father never spoke of it, so it must be so. Sometimes Will thought he might see it in his eyes, so he kept his eyes down, and then it became a habit, something else to take from his father.

Father tried to take him hunting once, on the advice of a great uncle-something-or-other, but they'd both hated it, hated the sight of the mighty stag falling, of the blood staining his hands when he futilely tried to stop it afterwards, and they buried it there in the woods, and returned home empty-handed, and didn't tell anyone about it. Instead, mother suggested fishing, and they'd spent a couple of holidays over in the Americas, when father was needed to consult on something or other, and Will and mother strolled the streets bright with sight and sound and smell, and Will loved it, that alien culture so different from the quiet of Caliburn House, so alive, but mother got a headache more easily, and more often than not, they'd have to go back to the rented property to sleep it off.

Mother disliked it there, Will could tell, but she didn't speak up. Will did, however, attracted to the lightning-quick jabs, the chatter at him, the local children just as curious as he was, that strange boy from the place that always rains with no sun. The _always alone_ boy, he stayed at the fringes of their games, and watched them play, and they never offered, they knew, felt something different, something wrong about him, they all knew, and so he watched, and taught himself their language, so different from anything he knew. The slang, drag of vowels, peculiar pronunciation of syllables that turned ordinary familiar words into the strange, the unknown, and he would bring them back for mother, as a gift, as a token of the outside culture, because she couldn't go out on her own, into that strange, bright place.

Even years after, when he would be teaching new students, child-like in his eyes, eager to learn (but never too eager, because no one likes a psychopath), he'd keep his eyes down and talk at them, because he didn't want to hear their flat tones, accents pressed deep within to hide their origins, and he did that too, with his own English accent, suppressed it under a Southern accent from his childhood, suppressed that under a generic American accent, because that was what was expected of him. So when he heard Doctor Lecter (invited into Jack's office, his inner sanctum) for the first time, heavy accent clinging to every word like a chaining weight, he frowned.

 

\--

 

Mother used to tell him about the Doctor. A cautionary tale, to cousin Hila's stories of romance, of love and action and exploration of the unknown, and father's brief report about the Witch of the Well, and she'd hold him close, and tell him to beware the Doctor, " _he has a sliver of ice in his heart_ ". Will never knew what she meant (since wasn't the Doctor only a story?), but he kept his eyes close to this new Doctor, cool and calm and collected, an ice statue with a beating heart.

And then he got too close, with the Minnesota Shrike, with Abigail's case, and kept his eyes closed (to his doctor, to this would-be threat) thereafter.

 

\--

 

"You will need an anchor," mother told him, back when she was still teaching him everything she knew, before they realized that being in her proximity only amplified his own empathy. "I have your father, and you, and your cousin Hila, and you have all three of us, but you will need more grounding."

"Why," he'd asked.

"Let's think of it as, in this way. We are lanterns, lighthouses, and other people are the boats that we can guide, or feel. But sometimes, we shine in different directions, shine so newly that people are blinded, and they crash into our walls, our barriers, and we feel them, feel every hurt and hate. That is why we cannot get too close, dear Will. That is why."

Will knew it, and learnt it, and learnt well. He'd tried to change things, of course, because nobody ever wanted to be lonely, and tried to fix things up as much as he could. It ended in people leaving, and leaving him, and he tried to fix this as well. If people were boats, then he'd just have to learn how to fix them, he'd thought, and learned from cousin Hila, who was a whiz at mechanics, and taught him that, just because you fixed engines, it didn't mean that the boat would still steer where you wanted it to.

 

\--

 

In the old Caliburn House, Emma used to sit her son down (such a curious boy, so eager to learn, to face the world, but his empathy, passed down from her own, made her cry, because she knew that she would have to leave soon), and they would go over a curious photo album, with pictures in fond sepia tones, which the Doctor had given "as an anniversary gift, maybe, or just an icebreaker". Millions of photos, millions of years crammed into one short book, dinosaurs and Victorians and the end of the world, and she would point out the house whenever it appeared, the ghostly signal to " _come home_ ", a silent anchor in the background.

When Will was slightly older, and questioning everything, he'd asked about the last photo.

"So that means that everything is going to end? Just like that?" he pointed.

"No, not everything. Not love. Not always." She smiled at his confusion, and leaned over to kiss his forehead. "You'll understand, one day."

 

\--

 

_"The most compassionate people you will ever meet, empathics, and the loneliest. I mean, exposing themselves to all those hidden feelings, all that guilt, pain, and sorrow." The Doctor, 'Hide'_

**Author's Note:**

> A fill for the prompt: http://hannibalkink.dreamwidth.org/1375.html?thread=581471
> 
> A/N: I really loved this prompt, and wanted to do a mini-fill. Naturally, since these two fandoms are just so epic, I've written more than I'd planned. Also, I've taken liberties with practically every character in this story, just to try to create some sort of coherent structure and logic. Hopefully it works *fingers crossed*.


End file.
